Dr. Bob’s Book Reviews


Cayce Medicine

Books by Gladys and Analea McGarey follow below.

Bill McGarey

Healing Miracles: Using Your Body Energies

by William McGarey, Harper and Row, San Francisco, 1988.

“The roots of present-day holism probably go back 100 years to the birth of Edgar Cayce in Hopkinsville, KY. By the time he died in 1945, Cayce was well recognized as a mystic who entered sleep trances and dictated a philosophy of life and healing called ‘readings.’”
John Callan, MD, editor,
Journal of the American Medical Association, March 1975.

For many years, what has been called “Cayce Medicine” was defined by works and practices of physicians Bill and Gladys McGarey based at the A.R.E. Clinic in Phoenix, Arizona. While administering what amounted in many ways to the “Cayce Clinic,” William McGarey wrote freely of his studies and gleanings from the medical readings of Edgar Cayce.

The present work is one of his better efforts which takes modern medicine to task while bringing forth the holistic approach which the McGareys championed for many years. Early on, Dr. Bill makes note that, “the practice of medicine in recent years has become so mechanized in many specialties that the true source of healing –– has been neglected or simply forgotten.”

McGarey remarks on how disease and diagnosis, testing and technology have become almost gods to medical practice. That while patients – human beings in distress – often get lost in the shuffle.

Calling forth the Cayce readings throughout the book, he repeatedly points to the importance of God and spirit in the healing process: “For who health all thy diseases? Only when any portion of the anatomical structure of a human body is put in accord with the divine influences, which is a portion of the consciousness of an individual entity, may real healing come. Without it, it is nil and becomes more destructive than constructive.” (5083-2)

There are numerous gems in this writing which was meant to emphasize the importance of body energies. Let us pull out a few of these treasures:

“The stresses that one encounters in life create turmoil in the physical body by upsetting the normal flow of electricity –– whereas peace or laughter or forgetting oneself in service creates a more coherent flow of electricity that strengthens the life forces.”

“We are first and foremost an energy being, created in the image of that Creative Power we call God.”

Borrowing from Kathleen McAuliffe, he repeats, “We all wear an invisible garment, an electromagnetic cloak that shields us from head to toe. From the moment of conception, electrical currents begin to flow in the tiny embryo, guiding the incredibly delicate process that culminates in birth.... we all retain an electromagnetic halo as a birthday suit we carry throughout life.”

McGarey spends much of his book telling of Clinic successes, especially those coming through its residential programs. The Temple Beautiful developed “happy families” over the course of many days of patients living, sharing, eating and telling their stories with each other while submitting to Clinic routines and treatments.

While the attunement required for healing may call for drugs or operations, it may also develop quite spontaneously through much simpler means.

“Love can be readily applied, no matter what the ailment or condition of the recipient.”

“For love is an active force; it heals both those who give and those who receive.”

“We know that a hug is more than just a hug. It is sharing laughter, a joy that brightens up the day. But even more than that, it allows each participant to experience the touching, the laying on of hands, the sharing of the aura of another human being.”

“We know that when one wants to be of service, even though it may be simply by touching another person, there is energy that comes out of the hands and acts to heal that other person. When both are desirous of helping, both experience the benefit of the healing touch.”

“Thousands of people, perhaps even millions, have helped their fellow human beings by practicing the art of the laying on of hands.... It is really an energy treatment, but best performed when one recognizes the Source of the energy that flows through the body and hands to the other person.”

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They will be appended here in a timely manner if the correspondent wishes.


Gladys McGarey



The Physician Within You 

by Gladys McGarey with Jess Stearn,
Inkwell Productions, Scottsdale, AZ, 2000.


Gladys McGarey was the other half of the dynamic duo which ran the Cayce Clinic, exposed Cayce therapies to the world, and spearheaded holistic medicine for twenty years. Gladys was one of the lights of the Clinic, the heart of its operations and its outreach to humans in need and in general. She was a late-comer to writing and drew on the skills of the relatively well known Jess Stearn, author of The Sleeping Prophet, to share her own healing stories.

Gladys begins her tale in a similar vein to The Healing Miracles of Bill McGarey. She decried that, “We’ve made a god out of science, and its temples are hospitals, medical school, scientific laboratories and even the government. There is nothing wrong with any of these except that our perception of them is all out of proportion. We think that unless a therapeutic modality comes down from one of these institutions to the physician or the public, it is not ‘scientific….’ We gave ourselves to specialists…. We need to create a whole new model of health care where holistic and conventional practices are brought together for the good of the patient and the physician.”

Dr. Gladys relates growing up under the tutelage of her parents who were osteopathic medical missionaries to India. Gladys early on envisioned herself as a doctor. She began treating injured animals, slowly graduating to working with the poor patients who appeared for care before her mother and father.

Gladys saw her parents providing true care to each patient, “the kind word, the touch of a hand, the reassuring embrace.” She also came to believe in other powers beyond those of typical practice. After she turned seriously ill with malaria in her teens, Gladys eventually concluded: “I have a feeling that their [her parents] prayers, more than any rudimentary medicines, played a large part in my getting well.”

The fundamental theme in Gladys’s medicine and book is that the answers lie within and can be retrieved by the healer on behalf of the one in jeopardy.

“I invariably believe the patient. What better source do I have?"

“The body is never helpless. Its immune system, awakened, is capable of staving off any disease.”

“Patients often know they have given themselves their illness.”

“Patients are my friends. Not all doctors take the same view.”

As she added Cayce remedies and perspective to her practice, Gladys was bound to have run-ins with the medical establishment. She heard herself being called a witch doctor, “a disgrace to a noble profession.”

Dr. Gladys tells many poignant narratives about her work with patients, listening to them, hearing the stories their illnesses had to share with them. “Illness gets a person’s attention.” One young man found his tumor to become a benign friend who helped him turn his life around.

Gladys the healer relates the story of a woman who unconsciously branded herself because of a sexual misdeed, another who was so identified with her disease that she put its name on her license plate, another with a serious ailment who had to live on until grandchild was born and her work done.

The Physician within each of us has much light and love to offer us, if we will but take time to listen and receive. Gladys McGarey is one of those who dares to listen as well as to do.

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Gladys and Analea McGarey

Gladys and Analea McGarey



Born to Heal:
The Life Story of Holistic Pioneer Gladys Taylor McGarey, MD

by Analea McGarey, Inkwell Productions, Scottsdale, AZ, 2003.

Gladys McGarey was ‘Born to Heal’ according to this biography written with the hand and heart of her daughter Analea. The book makes clear than Analea adored her mother. She thought of her as an ancient queen, a Greek goddess. That even though she was not unwilling to share Gladys’s travails and flaws.

The biography tells of Gladys growing up in India in the shadow of medical missionary parents, treating injured animals in childhood. She didn’t just want to be a doctor. She was one, born knowing her calling.  In much later years, Gladys recovered a memory of a previous lifetime in India. On a tour, Gladys visited the Taj Mahal and experienced a past incarnation as a midwife for Mumtaz Mahal. Mumtaz died in childbirth and her husband built the Taj Mahal in her honor. But, that was all in the future, or in the past, or both.

Despite the many wonders of her being, Dr. Gladys found herself often mired in self-doubt. That state was symbolized in the fact that she “flunked first grade.” But from an early age she could “light up a room,” radiating an unknown force. Even though set back a year, Gladys Taylor caught up quickly and entered Muskingum College (Ohio) at the age of seventeen. Gladys was thrilled by the enthusiasm she experienced on campus. Others felt Gladys’s own “electric current.”

On graduation, Gladys proceeded to the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. En route, she met William McGarey at a church scholarship meeting. For a time, Bill had imagined becoming a minister. It seems their encounter helped turn him toward a medical career after gathering his first degree from the College of the Ozarks. Bill went on to get his next degree in medicine at Cincinnati.

Along the way, the two married and produced a family of six. The four boys and two girls all followed in parental footsteps training and working in one field of medicine or another. The family fortunes were drawn after a few years to Phoenix, Arizona, where Dr. Bill had acted as a flight surgeon in the early 50s.

From that juncture, Analea’s book largely focuses on family experiences and the manifestation of the A.R.E. (Cayce) Clinic as well as the McGareys’ many involvements in the holistic medicine and consciousness movements. Bill and Gladys traveled widely in circles with Hugh Lynn Cayce, Norman Shealy, Milton Erickson, Ida Rolf, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and many other notables.

Their influence has been broad and significant. But, all fairy tales shift, change, or end. Analea tells of some of the conflicts which developed over latter years at the A.R.E. Clinic as well as its inevitable downturn. Drs. Bill and Gladys eventually went separate ways after 46 years of marriage.

Analea died in 2007, Dr. Bill in 2009. At this writing, Gladys is 98 years old. Still active, she is beginning to receive some of her just due even from the medical establishment which looked down on her practices with displeasure for many years.

Analea's book shares personal, family, and professional stories which may interest a wide range of readers.

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